So one side of the street is big box stored with giant parking lots, and the other side is parking garages with 1st floor businesses. Looks 1000% for cars and not transit.
I wouldn't conclude much from that development which is largely a retail and restaurant development in a long rundown industrial area (former Ford plant). [1] It was basically cut off from most of Sommerville by highways. There was long a plan to put an Ikea there but there was a lot of pushback from various groups and Ikea eventually walked.
Much of Sommerville away from the highways is essentially a gentrifying, historically somewhat downmarket, version of Cambridge. Generally low-rise houses and some condo complexes.
>I have walked around assembly row and it isn't terrible but it certainly doesn't feel like downtown Boston.
A new development shouldn't feel like the downtown from one of the oldest cities in the country. Age, architecture, construction materials, land and building re-use, and about a thousand other things can't be faked.
That doesn't mean they didn't build with these principles in mind.
That feels like it could be anywhere. I was in Boston last weekend in the Copley Square area, which I liked very much but my impression is it's very expensive.
Most of Boston is very expensive--and certainly the Back Bay. (Which is actually urban planning on landfill from the late 1800s--hence the streets that don't look like cow paths.) The new development (including highrises) is mostly clustered around the Seaport but that's actually apparently even more expensive these days.
I honestly don't get the appeal of Assembly Row. It reminds me of Bellevue, WA or the new developments in northern Virginia. Sprawling parking lots and boring outlets. Not really what I want the Boston area to become.
